AVIRA Press Center - March Virus Top 10

March Virus Top 10

Thu, 13 April 2006

Worm/Bagle.FI is dropping while phishing attack of the Chase Bank is beyond the usual EBay and PayPal top phishing

The March Virus Top 10 is disclosed today by Avira – one of the leading providers of IT-security software solutions for professional use. Based on specific statistic sources and virus experts’ input, the malware ranking shows that the well-known Netsky.P is once again on poll-position.

Looking back to the previous months, we notice that Netsky.P was and still is the number-one threat in the malware hierarchy, except for December and January when Sober.Y spread out massively. This pest leads the way, with a slight increase of 3.7 percent of the infections reported in March. We also notice that the difference between the first and second position of the virus chart is considerable – 18.5 percent, in contrast with the last month when we measured a small difference of 3.2 percent only.

Strange for this month is the fall of the Worm/Bagle.FI, which, starting March 10, dropped from the second position directly to the last one in the March Virus Top 10. We intercept only a few submissions as of today.

Another thing worth to notice is that from 173 different cyber threats such as Worms and Trojans, 97 of them are from the Mytob family, which represent more than 30 % of all intercepted samples.

Besides the two prevalent malware families – Netsky and Mytob, some variants of the Bagle worm were intercepted and detected as “Worm/Bagle.gen”. Those “Worm/Bagle.gen” covered 8.6 % of all submissions. Some of those Bagle worms were already described in the February Virus Top 10:

TR/Drop.Bagle.FR
Worm/Bagle.FI

Here is a first shot of our March Virus Top 10:

For technical information on any of these worms, please see the detailed descriptions on the Avira website. Also, please keep in mind that all Avira users are perfectly protected against these threats. Make sure you update Avira on a regular basis in order to stay safe from malware.

As for the phishing ranking in March, we have a new number-one target of phishing authors - the phishing attack of the Chase Bank (www.chase.com):

Chase Bank	49.33%
PayPal	23.32%
Ebay	15.77%
Volksbank	5.39%
Barclays Bank	2.02%
Altii	4.18%

The users were deceived by dangerously nice-looking emails designed to avoid detection from Antispam and Antiphishing tools.

The phishers used different techniques to make Internet users access a fake website:

the “redirect technique”,
the "forged toolbar" (displaying a false toolbar above the real one)
and even a social engineering trick (getting users' attention by asking them to take a survey and get 20$ reward for this).

One thing worth to mention is that each email has a different design and text, which means that the bad guys are actively working on a daily basis. Setting up new websites, designing phishing emails and finally distributing them are the main areas apart from stealing the money from victims that have fallen into the trap.

Avira strongly recommends all users to be careful with suspicious emails and unexpected attachments, no matter what interesting subjects they might claim to be carrying.

If you want to know more about these forms of cyber crime, please see or search for detailed descriptions on our website:
http://www.avira.com/en/threats/index.html

For more information on how to recognize a phishing fraud, take your time to read our dedicated page:
http://www.avira.com/en/threats/what_is_phishing.html

Remember that we are here to assist you against the malware threat. Get rid of your doubts when facing a suspect file: just send it to and we will analyze it for you. Take a moment to see how to submit malware and then follow our instructions to send the suspicious file:
http://original.avira.com/en/pages/How_to_submit_malware.html

About Avira GmbH

Avira (formerly H+BEDV) is one of the leading providers of IT-security software solutions for professional use. As one of the pioneers in this area, the German company has repeatedly contributed to the security market since its launch of AntiVir in 1988 with technological innovations and intelligent new solutions to protect all network components and network levels.

The Avira headquarters are in Tettnang, a Swabian town located near Lake Constance. The company, which was founded as H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH in 1986, works in close cooperation with the BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) and maintains technology partnerships with leading security providers. Companies all over the world, financial and IT service providers, public institutions, educational institutes and public clients trust in the security solutions of Avira and protect themselves with AntiVir.

The first on-access scanner under UNIX, based on an originally developed Open Source project “Dazuko” (file access control), is just one example. Another is the world's first certified malware protection solution for SAP. Or the security products for mobile devices, which achieved market maturity very quickly. The AntiVir scanner has been awarded the VB100% a number of times.

Website: www.avira.com

Other news from this category	Archive